


Fear, in a Handful of Dust

by transubstantiate



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: I'll be updating the tags as the story progresses, and stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 06:27:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4252857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transubstantiate/pseuds/transubstantiate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke is iron and Hawke is ice, and Hawke is plummeting down, falling out of the sky.<br/>But that's ok.<br/>She catches herself. She always does. It's what Hawkes do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fear, in a Handful of Dust

It’s the same story, at first. 

Her father is an apostate, her sister is too, and her brother is never anything but angry.

When blue sparks first spill from her fingertips, she is eight.

Her mother calls her in from the fields, and she says to her husband, “They’ll not take Bethany from me,” and in the background, Marian, flush with fifteen years of hard summers and hidden magic, bristles.

Her skin turns pale and she sneaks out to run with Marian in the mornings and she sets a dog to sleep and her mother wraps cold fingers around her wrist and says, “Stay home.”

She does.

Carver folds himself around the farm and his eyes get sadder and angrier and at first, Bethany can make him laugh by making shadows dance around their bedroom, but one night he slaps her hands away, spits on the floor in front of her.

He comes to her later, weeping, begging for her forgiveness, and she flicks little snowflakes into his hair, but gives it to him. How could she not? The other half of her soul is in him.

Their father dies.

There’s only a few people at the funeral, men who had worked the farm with him, the three or so women their mother had let get close. She links her hand with Marian’s and stands behind their mother. Carver is nowhere to be seen.

Bethany waits until the sun has gone down and scoots out of the house. Her father’s grave is a mound of black earth under a tree with star-shaped leaves.

She sinks to her knees and buries her hands in the dirt and forces the magic, out, down. It ripples through her arms and reality flickers around her; strange flowers sprout up, reds and golds and purples.

The magic shudders and stops flowing and Bethany drops back to the ground and cries and cries, tears flooding down her cheeks.

“I’m so afraid,” she says to her father, to her flowers.

She is sixteen, and the magic comes surging back in the morning.

Marian grows icy and inscrutable, wearing hard eyes and watchful glares. She doesn’t carry a staff, just sends growing spells into their dirt when Carver isn’t looking, and Carver, he fights. He wraps scraps of cloth around his fists and men at the tavern wager on his bouts, Hawke vs. the Drifter.

Marian brings him home, a hand at his collar. They fight into the night, and Carver goes into the fields the next day with a black eye and a proud chin, and Marian watches him with something like a smile.

Their mother diminishes.

The Blight comes, and the refugees, and their mother won’t let the poor camp on the farm, but Marian gives them places on the outskirts, says they can set up their tents on the fallow fields. 

There is warning, because of this.

Marian wakes to faint screaming and she smells blood in the wind and she rouses Bethany and Carver and their mother, in that order.

The refugees die, and the Hawkes make it to the hills.

There’s darkspawn, darkspawn everywhere, and the rocks are sharp as broken glass, and the sky is blood, blood and burning, and Bethany’s breath is sobbing out of ragged lungs but Marian’s eyes are dark and Carver’s eyes are angry, so she keeps going.

She rounds a corner too fast and suddenly there’s a templar there, his sword levelled at her throat, and she stops short. Marian hurtles toward her and stops as well, staff held loosely, red fire gathering around her fingertips. 

“Stop,” the templar whispers, and Marian shakes her head, but the templar is pale, too pale, and he crumples slowly to his knees.

“Wesley!” someone shouts, and a woman stumbles down from the crest of a hill, darkspawn pursuant, and the blood in the sky pounds loud against Bethany’s skull. Carver lunges forward past the woman and Marian turns with him, loosing the fire from her palm across the approaching menace.

But Bethany’s eyes are full of the templar on the ground, and the woman cradling his head in her hands, and Bethany steps forward, hesitantly, and says, “I can help,” and the blue light is already gathering at the end of her staff.

“Stay back, apostate!” The templar struggles to lift his sword.

“Don’t be a fool, Wesley,” the woman says, and the blue light passes quick and gentle between Bethany and her enemy.

“I’m Bethany,” she says.

“Aveline,” the woman replies.

“We have to keep going,” Marian says and there is no argument. Their mother falls behind and Carver drops back to help her and Bethany slings one of the templar’s arms over her shoulder and he says “I don’t need you.”

And she grunts, “Please be quiet.”

Marian gains the summit of a hill and turns to the rest of them, beckoning them forward.

“Where are we even going?” wails their mother. 

“Onward,” Carver says.

“Upward,” Bethany murmers.

A shadow looms behind Marian, and Bethany whispers her name. She hears her, hears something, and she turns, sees, rolls lightning-quick out of the way. Bethany drops the templar and sprints up the hill, Carver half a heartbeat behind her.

Marian has her staff stretched out and her head tossed back and she’s laughing, fire stretching in a vivd arc, redder than red, across the dark sky, and the sun breaks, lighting her up just as-

The ogre is faster than her, harder than her magic, and it wraps giant fists around her body and Marian’s spine snaps.

Bethany screams.

Ice explodes from her hands, crystallizing the ogre’s brains, and she’s with it, loose in the air. Voices whisper in her head (I’m sorry) (You’ll hear that sound forever) 

(Jump)

(Cross over)

She drops to hands and knees, Carver by her side. Their mother shakes Marian’s body, begging her to wake up, promising that she loves her, and something hard and ugly blooms in Bethany’s heart.

Darkspawn surge over the hill and Bethany meets her death with dull eyes and a ready hand. 

(Jump) the voices insist, (Cross over)

But there’s a dragon, a dragon that burns the darkspawn, that eats them, and it touches down lightly and it is a woman with dark eyes and too much knowing in her voice

“You’re going the wrong way,” she tells Bethany, turning on one graceful foot.

“You’re leaving us here?” Carver demands, and the woman smiles unpleasantly.

“What would you have me do?” she asks him. “I have seen what I have seen. The darkspawn are everywhere.”

“We need to get to Kirkwall,” Bethany says.

“So far,” the woman says. “But I can take you to the coast, if you help me with something.”

“Can we trust her?” Carver asks.

“We don’t have a choice,” Bethany says, but she is afraid.

The templar chokes on his own blood, and Aveline cries out, and the woman turns to Bethany and says, “And what will you choose, Bethany Hawke? Will you shake the world?”

“No,” Bethany says, and she is nineteen when she takes a strange amulet from a strange woman and Aveline slides her knife across her husband’s throat and the woman-who-is-a-dragon takes them to the coast.


End file.
